This Chef's Food Photos Are Terrifying

Chefs are always looking for innovative and exciting ways to plate their food. So give credit to chef Robbie Postma for presenting his dishes in the most unlikely of places: all over his own face. Admittedly, the results aren’t particularly appetizing, but they’re unlike anything you’ve seen before.

“MENU” is an artsy photo series that teamed Postma with photographer Robert Harrison (interestingly, they work at the same ad agency) for the stated goal of showing “a dinner through the eyes of a photographer and chef.” The results are certainly unexpected: The duo decided to break each “course” down to its basic ingredients and then tediously arrange those ingredients on Postma’s head and face to create what I would describe as a mask of food. The photos from the shoot that followed are otherworldly – as if they’d be better suited for a bizarre horror film than a foodie magazine, evoking things like tribal cultures, medical experiments or – I dunno – a Marilyn Manson album cover?

“Eating at a restaurant isn't about the sustenance. It's about the experience,” the team explains on their website. “A good menu is a story, with its own narrative arc. Tension is built and released, emotions are evoked and questions are raised. We want to create a visual exploration of this story. To keep it personal, we decided to use a very personal canvas. This is why our menu is not served on a plate, but on a face.” They also stress, “Every ingredient has been attached manually, no Photoshop, handcrafted with every attention to detail. Just like in a good kitchen.”

From vegetables to seafood to wine to meat to spices to starch to sweets to the final coffee, all eight photos show these elements on Postma’s face and, in turn, the finished project is very much in your face. Frankly, I don’t really know how much it says about the dining experience, though there is something odd about looking at food and thinking, I definitely do not want to try eating that.